The Marathwada region is annually in the news for two reasons, both unfortunate—drought or floods. This year it was the latter. Four key districts of the usually drought-prone geography suffered immense crop damage due to excessive downpour in the retreating monsoon months.  While the agrarian crisis consumed news space, a niche piece of information introduced this columnist to a distinct whiff from Marathwada.  The India Foundation For The Arts  (IFA) hosted a talk by scholar-writer and Pune resident Keshav Waghmare, who hails from a village in the Beed district of Marathwada.  Waghmare spoke of eight shahirs (poets) of Marathwada, who have nurtured their musical tradition as a tool to create political consciousness. 
 
Waghmare has been in touch with these poets since 2017, which is much before he availed the IFA grant for studying the genesis of shahiri—etymologically rooted in the Farsi ‘shayar’ and embraced in Marathi ethos since Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s times—particularly focusing on eight shahirs’ contribution in contemporary Marathwada.  As he started interviewing the eight songmakers,  the pandemic and COVID protocols took charge of the life of his subjects. He continued to intermittently collate their verse for a video archive. A book on the eight shahirs is currently in the pipeline, with a mid-2023 deadline, but the video documentation of the eight voices—one shahir, Atmaram Salve, is no more—is proving to be a harder task.

Meghanand Jadhav’s songs express his dissatisfaction with the current socio-political environment